Friday, January 06, 2006

Of Course Torture is Useful at Extracting Information...

...if you don't care about accuracy and only care about getting people to tell you what you want to hear, as Al Qaida higher up Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi claims was the case with him.

Apparently, some of the facts seem to support his side of the story, such as the fact that:

The officials said the captive, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, provided his most specific and elaborate accounts about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda only after he was secretly handed over to Egypt by the United States in January 2002, in a process known as rendition.

This seems to support the concerns of Matthew Yglesias, about which I posted here. (Read an earlier New York Times article about Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi here).

Which indicates one reason why torture is a bad idea. Even if the person being tortured richly deserves his fate, torture corrupts not only the information obtained in an interrogation, but also the people doing the interrogation.

Thanx and a tip o' the hat to Charles Dodgson.

That is all.

No comments: